Andrew Jordan was able to look beyond a disappointing weekend of results at Oulton Park, as he dropped to third in the British Touring Car Championship standings.
The Pirtek Racing driver’s weekend was – like a number of other drivers – blighted by a red flag in qualifying, which limited him to 13th in qualifying.
And with overtaking opportunities on the International circuit hard to come by, Jordan was limited to just one top-ten finish – an eighth place in race three – in addition to one 15th- and one 10th-placed finish.
Jordan’s results mean that he relinquished the championship lead for the first time since Rockingham last year, and the 25-year-old was ultimately disappointed with his run of results at the Cheshire circuit, despite feeling as though he had a strong car underneath him.
“The car wasn’t good in race one but if we’d qualified sixth or seventh, we’d have run where we qualified,” said Jordan. “In race two, we lost the weight and that made the car better and we might have made a bit of progress, but not much.”
“With how good we made the car for race two and taking the weight out, starting from 15th I’d have expected to make the top six, but there was just nowhere to overtake.
“We had an eighth in the last race, but we just weren’t there with the car. Normally in those conditions I’d have been confident of getting into the top six, but we just didn’t have the pace.”
But Jordan refused to read too much into the weekend’s results, insisting that his qualifying setback was to blame, and not a drop in performance.
“It’s been a poor weekend, but we’re not going to panic about it,” said the current champion. “It all stemmed from qualifying because we’ve seen from the racing today that there’s just been no overtaking.”